India@75: Indian accents and the ease of being same same but different today

There is growing acceptance that there is no one way to speak English or German or any other language - especially when it comes to communicating for business. (Ilyass Seddoug via Unsplash)

When Harish Mehta, founder of Onward Technologies Ltd, returned from the US in the 1970s, he struggled because India's policy framework for the technology sector was just starting to crystallize. In his recent book The Maverick Effect (Harper Collins, 2022), Mehta shares hilarious incidents such as stapler pins being put through floppy disks.

There were language problems, too, as the vocabulary for all things tech and tech business was still growing rapidly. In terms of communication and technical vocabulary back then, there was another problem - linguistic states. Each state had a mother tongue, and unless you spoke the language, it could be hard to break into the inner circle of trading and business.

Thankfully, some industries that have flourished both at the domestic front as well as overseas, began to work around these hurdles. English became the de facto choice for speakers of Telugu, Kannada, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati... to connect at work.

Thankfully also, this didn't mean an erasure of difference or diversity altogether. We each brought to the mix cultural nuances, accents and words that had no equivalent in English.

Tapping in

To be sure, different dialects and accents can be seen in other languages too.

That’s one of the things that Ahmedabad-based German language teacher Ronak Vaidya, who founded the Ahmedabad School of Linguistics (ASL) in 2017, helps people crack when he trains them for the language test they need to take in order to seek migration abroad.

Vaidya points out how there has been a steady rise of Indian professionals going to Germany since the 2000s because of the IT boom as well as the free access to public education in Germany.

“The real challenge for Indians who know German is in navigating standard German that is spoken in Germany versus the dialectic German that is spoken in Austria and Switzerland,” says Vaidya, who has a master's in the philosophy of the mind and the philosophy of language from Gujarat University.

Vaidya adds, learners of new languages are not supposed to unlearn or scrap knowledge of their mother tongue from their minds. “It is your asset. It is not your liability,” he says.

When children learn a language, the brain creates a fresh neural pathway. Vaidya adds, “When adults do (this), they learn it in a totally different way. The understanding of the new language gets adjusted into existing neural pathways that were created when they learned the prior languages.”

This learning process can lead to “language mixing”, and migration as well as cultural contact are for the way languages continue to evolve in a healthy way all over the world.

Linguistic racism as well as negative interpretations of such a language change can stall a person's growth. Unfortunately, instances of this kind of discrimination abound - such as when we don't make an effort to understand someone's heavily accented English, subjecting the person to humiliation and hurt instead.

It makes social and cultural biases and fears creep in as well as inhibition, stagnation, and also the extinction of a language and a culture. Many Indians, for instance, still tend to refrain from travelling to other ‘non-English’ countries in Europe and South East Asia without hiring an expensive travel escort who does all the communication for them because the popular perception is: “You won’t be able to communicate with anyone there,” as they’ll tell you. But that’s far from the truth. There are as many Asians and Europeans speaking comprehensible English around these countries today as there are Indian English speakers in India speaking their own variations of English.

Students at the Ahmedabad School of Linguistics.

Where there is business, there's a way

Vikasraj Juneja, a diamond trader and gemologist from Surat who supplies jewellery all over India, says the Four “Cs”—cut, clarity, carat, and carat size—are understood everywhere in the diamond trade. “That is the only parameter that we need to know in terms of what colour and clarity you want and what sizes you want,” he says.

This makes it easy for him and his trading fraternity to understand buyers’ specifications, regardless of what language is spoken. Language is thus not really a barrier for Juneja except for perhaps in places where Hindi and English are not spoken at all. “In the South, locals hold their mother tongue at a very high standard, and it is a matter of pride and ego for them, as they do not like to converse in any language other than their own mother tongue,” he says.

But with the rise of e-commerce and access to online shopping, a large part of the linguistic difficulties between different speakers in the supply chain are being bridged.

Given these factors, English is now the de facto language that diamond traders like Juneja use around Gujarat. “A majority of the global diamond deals take place from Surat,” emphasises Juneja.

Cultural assertions

Linguists have often studied the varieties of English and have found that there are a million dialects of English all over the world, some of which are standardised and recognised and some of which are still undocumented and informal.

No two communities on this planet speak in the same way, and there isn’t any one kind of English, or even, for that matter, any one kind of Hindi or any one kind of Gujarati. The mark of a successful language lies in its subversion, corruption, and subsequent diversification. The more it travels to new lands, the more power it acquires.